


One

by beedekka



Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-27
Updated: 2010-01-27
Packaged: 2017-10-06 18:01:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beedekka/pseuds/beedekka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lister plays the Total Immersion Videogame 'Better Than Life', but he gets more than he bargained for when one of the electrodes malfunctions and temporarily leaves him with some rather invasive hallucinations!</p><p>This was written for Kahvi for the '20 Years of Dwarf' fest, working to the prompt: Lister/Lister. Any alternates. More than two if you like.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work of fanfiction. The author claims no creative ownership over the characters, will make no money from this story, and means no offence by it.

"Oh god, I still feel like I'm one-third outside reality," Lister mumbled. Kryten was shining a small medi-torch into his eyes and he blinked at the bright light.

"Now don't panic, sir," Kryten reassured him. "I've successfully removed the jammed electrode from your frontal lobe, and the residual hallucinations should fade out over the next hour or so. Then you'll be back to your normal self."

"I don't understand this, Kryten. I walked out of the game through that ridiculous door – the creepy host in the awful suit said goodbye to me… How could that happen if the electrode wasn't retracting?" Lister frowned, confused by the whole situation.

"I'm not in a position to say, Mr Lister. When technology like this malfunctions, we can't always explain what went wrong."

"Then how do you know that I'll be back to normal in an hour?" Lister asked, his voice coming out a little higher than he had intended.

"Sir, just ten minutes ago you were standing here holding a five-way conversation with Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, Senator McCarthy and Albert Einstein. You didn't even know I was in the room. Now you're holding a conversation with me and you're perfectly aware of your surroundings. If you'll permit me to hypothesise for a moment…" He looked to Lister for confirmation.

Lister nodded his encouragement, and Kryten continued, "I think this shows that the effects of the Senso-lock feedback technique are working in our favour. 'Better Than Life' works by picking out your subconscious and conscious desires and manipulating the game to act upon them. Now, your desire is for everything to go back to normal, so that's what is happening. The hallucinations are just residual Senso-locks that weren't disengaged properly when the electrode got stuck."

"I wish _I_ could be so positive that this'll all wear off!" Lister replied.

"Don't think like that, sir," Kryten responded quickly. "Remember, it's acting on _your_ impulses."

Lister rubbed his hand over his eyes. "What am I gonna do for the next hour, then… while all this calms down?"

"I suggest you go and lie down, sir, and try not to think about anything that could be described as, erm, negative. You don't want to hallucinate any giant, hideous, eyeball-eating Xyrillian toads, for instance."

"Kryten, you smeghead! Now that's exactly what I'm imagining," Lister exclaimed.

"Oh, I'm sorry – I didn't intend to put that image into your mind, sir. Quickly, think of something else to distract yourself from it."

"Like what?"

"I don't know, sir. Think of an all-you-can-eat curry offer at the best take-away you've ever been to… Think of the whole British Ladies Zero-Gee football team in the showers after practice…"

"Now I'm thinking of the whole British Ladies Zero-Gee football team showering in curry in the middle of a take-away!" Lister shook his head violently.

"But surely that's a favourite fantasy of yours?" Kryten questioned. "What's wrong?"

"They're all getting their eyeballs eaten out by a giant hideous Xyrillian toad!"

"Oh sir, I'm sure you can come up with something more positive to occupy your mind. Think of somewhere you feel safe, or about a person you trust," Kryten suggested. "When I want to calm down, I like to think of a freshly-completed pile of ironing, or a well-made cake. Perhaps you could try thinking of those yourself."

Lister gave him a look that was intended to convey just how un-calming he thought images of ironing were, but Kryten merely smiled reassuringly and continued to speak as though he wasn't the recipient of a withering glare. "Now, you go and lie down. I'm going to put an out-of-order sign on the TIV consol. We don't want the Cat or Mr Rimmer settling in for a game and finding that they're stuck in a virtual reality hell of their own making, too."

With that, Kryten gathered up his mismatched collection of tools – half of them medical utensils, half of them DIY implements – and set off to carry out his task, leaving Lister to make his own way to the quarters he shared with Rimmer.

 

"Oh man, this is seriously weirding me out," Lister groaned to himself, as he stumbled through the door and fell onto Rimmer's bunk. He would have made the short climb to his own bed, but it was currently covered with the unsavoury contents of the bin, spread out there earlier when he'd been trying to find something to write on.

He rolled Rimmer's scratchy Titan-Hilton blanket around his fully clothed body and lay back, trying to banish the images of eyeless female football players from his mind. If anything, the scene had got worse now the toad had left the take-away – a pile of cake-covered ironing had appeared in the vision, swiftly followed by a mountain of rubbish, and the girls were strewing it all around the place along with the curry.

He closed his eyes and tried to follow Kryten's advice to think positive thoughts. He _could_ think about someone who he trusted, he supposed, but who? Not Rimmer, or Cat. They'd all been around each other long enough to know where each other's loyalties were pledged, and Lister fully realised that when the going got tough, it usually became every man – or hologram, or felix sapien – for himself. He could think of Kryten, perhaps, but surely his behaviour was only dictated by his programming? It wasn't really a case of trusting Kryten to help him out, it was a case of trusting that he wouldn't malfunction like the TIV consol had.

_Smegging hell_, Lister thought to himself. The only person he really trusted was himself, and even then, not all that much!

He pulled the blanket closer around him, although it wasn't particularly comforting and he was already too hot. At least the visions of the Zero-Gee team had receded. He was grateful that the hallucinations didn't seem to be manifesting themselves in the flesh any more, as well. It had been seriously creepy to be standing on Red Dwarf with Monroe, DiMaggio, McCarthy and Einstein earlier, and to have actually been able to reach out and touch them. That was the last thing he needed, the hallucinations to become 'real' again… Now he was just going to do what Kryten had told him to: lie quietly and not think about anyone besides people he trusted. He wasn't going to think about anything beyond himself.

"Dave."

"What?" he answered tersely. He didn't really want to be bothered while he was in this state.

"I heard you weren't feeling so good. You got yourself stuck in a videogame. Well, I know that feeling, mate. I thought I'd come along and see if I could help you out."

"Thanks, but Kryten says it should wear off in an hour. I'll be alright on my own," he replied without thinking.

"Oh right, no worries then."

"Hang on!" Lister opened his eyes and sat up on the bunk with a start. "Am I talking to who I think I'm talking to?"

"Who do you think you're talking to?" the man standing in the corner asked him, cheekily.

"Sebastian Doyle!" Lister whispered.

"The not one and only," Lister's sharp-suited alter ego grinned at him.

"Smeg, I've hallucinated you onto Red Dwarf," exclaimed Lister. "Go away, I'm trying to get back to normal."

"What? Back to reality? I know all about that," Doyle smirked.

"Yeah, and you also know all about how to be a killer fascist bastard," Lister countered.

"Hey, no need to be like that. You know how I feel about the CGI job – I went into the game to get away from it all."

"Maybe, but you still did those things before you went in there, didn't you 'voter-colonel'?" Lister pointed out. "You still ran the Ministry of Alteration."

Doyle shrugged and stared back at him, his hands resting casually in the pockets of his long coat. "You need to lighten up, my friend," he said. "All this getting-a-spike-in-the-head has made you a bit tense, hasn't it? Do you know what I like to do when I get a bit tense?"

"_Eh?_ No!" Lister answered, seriously perturbed by the bizarre situation unfolding in his quarters.

"Yes you do," Sebastian grinned again. "You're me – it's exactly the same thing you like to do…"

Lister wasn't happy with where this was going one bit, especially when Doyle accentuated his point by visibly shifting his right hand inside his pocket to make an obscene gesture. At least he hoped it was just the gesture… the position of Doyle's pocket _was_ rather close to his groin.

"Urgh," Lister shuddered. That was something he did not want to see.

"What's the matter?" Sebastian enquired, starting to walk towards the bunk. "It doesn't seem to bother you when you're doing it. And don't pretend you haven't cracked one off in front of a mirror before, 'cause I know you have."

As he got closer, Lister could see that it wasn't just the gesture Doyle was making; his right hand was definitely on his cock through the material of the coat and his trousers.

"You've done it in the mirror before," Doyle continued. "You wanted to see what your face looked like when you had your game on. You wanted to see what all the girls you hoped to shag would see. Hmm," he gave a small laugh, "well, I say girls…"

"Jeez man, stop it!" Lister told him, pointedly looking away from the figure advancing across the room. Why the hell was he hallucinating _this_?

He tried to think about something else, but his mind suddenly appeared absolutely paralysed into thinking only about himself indulging… himself.

"Come on Dave," his fascist counterpart cooed at him. "You can give me a hand if you like."

"No, I don't like!" Lister answered quickly.

"But I'm not disappearing, am I? You can't be thinking that hard about how much you hate me doing this…"

Doyle was by his bunkside, now, leaning over Lister and smiling his politician smile.

"This is so low," Lister murmured, shaking his head to try and clear the hallucination out. Still, it wouldn't disappear, but _something_ strange was happening.

Lister brought his hand up to cover his eyes as the figure before him began to shift and alter. Repulsed yet fascinated, he watched it changing through a tiny crack between his fingers.

Doyle was morphing into his low self!

"Oh god," Lister moaned, dropping the hand from his eyes. This was even worse.

He could feel the heat of his doppelganger's foul breath, and the spray of spittle hitting him in the face as the low bore down on him. His strange, crazed laugh filled Lister's ears – it whirred at a higher pitch than any of the mechanical sounds Red Dwarf could make.

Lister shuddered. The psychopath leaning into the bunk was familiar to him _as him_ in appearance only, and even that was horribly twisted. The blackened teeth and tiny, glittery eyes made him look like some kind of desperate nocturnal rodent.

Lister squirmed and pushed himself up against the side of the bunk, painfully aware that the further in towards the wall he moved, the more thoroughly he was getting trapped by this maniac.

The low's laughter sounded really inhuman now, having reached a frenzied level. _He's cracked_, Lister realised. _It's like he shot out the back of his head with a bazookoid, put his hat back on and carried on living. _

Lister turned his face as far as he could to the right, trying to avoid the cigar-stained lips that were now hovering only inches from his cheek. He jammed his eyes shut as the low's demonic laughter and his own broken breathing echoed in his head. The only way out of this was to try harder to hallucinate it away, he realised, and he tried to think of more positive images.

Suddenly, the clamour ceased. The laughter was replaced by the sound of an altogether gentler, throaty giggle. A decidedly feminine chuckle.

_Oh, thank you subconscious, thank you, Lister silently cheered. I knew you'd come through for me. _

He felt teasing fingers run lightly over his neck.

"Krissie," he murmured as the hand caressed his chin, carefully turning his face away from the wall of the bunk.

Lister kept his eyes closed, savouring her touch and inhaling her warm scent; female sweat, and… lager… and meat vindaloo? He opened his eyes in shock. _Smeg!_ It was still him… er, her. _Deb Lister._

"Oh god," he groaned again, freezing underneath her hands.

"Are you going soft on me?" Deb Lister demanded indignantly. "Don't tell me you've turned shy in the bedroom department. You were keen enough the last time we did this!"

"I can't remember anything about the last time we did this," Lister squeaked. It was true, after all. "I was off my face on export lager."

"Come on, open your legs so I can feel you properly," Lister's female counterpart challenged him, pressing a palm up against the part of the blanket that was currently covering his groin area.

"Stop!" Lister hissed, ramming his knees and thighs firmly together. Too late, he realised that he probably should have twisted his hips away from her first, as he'd only succeeded in trapping her hand between his legs.

"That's more like it," Deb exclaimed. "Now we're really cooking."

"No we aren't," Lister said. "We're not even hungry. Get off me!"

"Well suit yourself then, you miserable git!" Deb Lister snapped, "I'll know where _not_ to come looking next time I want a bit of fun."

With that, her hand disappeared from where it had been caught in the folds of the blanket, which was now thoroughly tangled around Lister's legs. He sighed with relief and pressed the back of his arm against his forehead, wiping the sweat from his brow. Deb stepped away from the bunk and out of his field of vision. _That's right brain,_ he encouraged himself, _back to normal… just get everything calmed down._

"Hey, old man."

_What?!_

Deb might have gone, but he still wasn't alone. Lister sat up and peered out of the bunk, straight at his younger self.

"You're tripping some shit tonight, huh? You need to chill out – I've got a tape of the Om song if you wanna put it on."

"That's not gonna chill me out, that's gonna make me feel worse!" Lister replied, really wishing that this ongoing parade of 'hims' would take a wrong turning and get off his street.

"Seriously, you need to tap into the shared love experience, man. You're acting like some kind of crypto-fascist."

"Smegging hell, I used to talk like such a twat!" Lister groaned.

"There's no need to be like that," his younger self complained, hurt. "You're out here in space – you could be at one with the universe, but you're stressing and flipping out. That's wrong."

_And you're right_, Lister suddenly thought. I'm stressing and it's getting me nowhere. 'Better Than Life' gives you the chance to fulfil your wildest dreams and I've only succeeded in hallucinating a series of crazy versions of me who not only _aren't_ better than me, they _aren't even as good as me._ Jeez, that's saying something.

"Hey," he told his surprised younger self, "I gave you some advice before, and you took it; not that it worked out in the end, but you took it. Now I'm gonna take some of yours…"

Lister quickly lay back on Rimmer's bunk and closed his eyes again. He forced himself to relax and imagine he was alone in the room, that everything was calm and none of the events of the last half an hour had even happened.

"See ya, kid," he whispered, but he didn't open his eyes to check whether he was gone. He stretched out instead, and focussed on filling his mind with nothing, just black space. Dark, empty nothingness… surrounding him, surrounding Red Dwarf, inside him.

_This is freaky, but it works_, he grinned to himself. Just the one of me, at one with the universe! Then there was a second where he felt like he was everything and nothing at once, before the feeling slipped away and the only thing left was the gentle hum of Red Dwarf's engines in the background.

 

"Oi, compost-breath! Get out of my bunk!"

"Huh?" Lister jarred awake, feeling like he'd slept for hours.

"I said, get out of my bunk, you goit – just because you've tipped a bin upside down in your bed, it doesn't mean that you can get into mine," Rimmer grumbled.

Lister couldn't help chuckling, "Aw, you're just saying that. You love it really, don't you? Any excuse to share and you'd be right in there."

"Is that right?" Rimmer snorted.

"Reckon," Lister answered.

"Do you know what's up with the TIV set-up? I wanted to use it but there's a big out-of-order sign on there."

"We had a problem with it – it started to eat my mind," Lister explained, badly.

"Smeg, are you alright?" Rimmer, to his credit, looked worried. "You haven't got enough that you can afford to lose any."

"Hey, get knotted! Anyway, yeah – I'm fine, thanks for asking. My mind's nearly all there, and the bits I lost; they were the bits I don't want, Arnie."

Rimmer looked at him quizzically. "You're still in my bunk."

"Your bunk's comfortable."

"You're wearing your boots."

Lister looked towards the end of the bed. There was no arguing with that.

Rimmer made an exasperated noise. "I'm going to go and get a full debrief from Kryten, and I want you out of there by the time I get back. And for heaven's sake clear some of this mess up while you're at it, will you?" He turned on his heel and walked towards the door, muttering under his breath, "I don't know what's wrong with you, sometimes."

As Rimmer left, Lister stared up at the roof of the bunk and exhaled contentedly.

"Nothing's wrong," he whispered. "Everything's normal."

 

-fin-


End file.
